Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  Obviously I did not hold that one should languish in perpetual virginity. But I was sure that the wedding-night should be a white mass: true love sublimates the physical embrace, and in the arms of her chosen one the pure young girl is briskly changed into a radiant young woman. I loved Francis Jammes because he painted physical passion in colours as simple and as clear as the waters of a mountain torrent; I loved Claudel above all because he celebrates in the body the miraculously sensitive presence of the soul. I refused to read to the end of Jules Romains’ Le Dieu des corps because in it physical pleasure was not described as an expression of the spirit. I was exasperated by Mauriac’s Souffrances du chrétien which the NRF was publishing just then. In the former triumphant, in the latter humiliated, I found that in both of them the flesh was given too much importance. I was indignant with Clairaut who, in his reply to a questionnaire in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, denounced ‘the rag-bag of the flesh and its tragic tyranny’, and also with Nizan and his wife who claimed that married couples should enjoy complete sexual licence.

  I justified my repugnance in the same way as when I was only seventeen years old: all is well if the body obeys the head and the heart, but it must not take the first step. This argument was all the more illogical because Romains’ heroes were ‘spontaneous’ lovers and the Nizans were apostles of sexual freedom between man and woman. Moreover the reasonable prudery I felt at seventeen had nothing to do with the mysterious ‘horror’ which so often used to chill my heart. I did not feel directly threatened; sometimes I had been momentarily seized by a physical urge: at the Jockey for example, in the arms of certain dancers; or at Meyrignac, when, lying with my sister in the long grass, we would be locked in one another’s arms; but I enjoyed these intoxicating sensations which made me feel in tune with my body; it was curiosity, and sensuality that made me want to discover the resources and secrets of my body; I waited without apprehension and even without impatience the moment when I would become a woman. It affected me in a rather round-about way: through Jacques. If physical love was only an innocent game, there was no reason why he shouldn’t indulge in it; but then our conversations ought not to carry much weight with him beside the joyous and violent delights he had known with other women; I admired the pure and lofty tone of our relationship: but in fact it was incomplete, insipid, lacking in body, and the respect Jacques showed me was dictated by the most conventional morality; I was assigned the thankless role of the little girl cousin, of whom one is quite fond – what distance lay between such a green girl and a man rich in the full possession of all a man can experience! I didn’t want to submit to such an inferior position. I preferred to look upon debauchery as a defilement; then I could allow myself to hope that Jacques had not been contaminated by it; if he had, then I didn’t envy him – I pitied him; I would rather forgive him his weaknesses than be exiled from his pleasures. Yet this prospect also frightened me. I yearned for the transparent confusion of our souls; if he had committed murky deeds, I was robbed of his past and even of his future, for our story, wrong from the start, would never fit in with the one I had invented for us. ‘I don’t want life to obey any other will but my own,’ I wrote in my journal. Here I think lay the root of my anguish. I knew almost nothing of physical reality; in my class of society it was masked by conventions and rituals; these tedious formalities bored me, but I didn’t attempt to seize the root of existence; on the contrary, I found escape in the clouds; I was a soul, a pure, disembodied spirit; I was only interested in people’s souls and spirits. The advent of sexuality destroyed this angelic concept; it suddenly revealed to me, in all their dreadful unity, sexual appetite and sexual violence. I had had a shock, in the place Clichy, because I had felt the most intimate link between the pimp’s revolting trade and the policeman’s brutality. It was not I but the world that was at stake: if men had bodies that were heavy and racked with lust, the world was not the place I had thought it was. Poverty, crime, oppression, war: I was afforded confused glimpses of perspectives that terrified me.

  Nevertheless, in the middle of November I returned to Montparnasse. I suddenly wearied of books, student gossip, cinemas. Was this any way to live? Was it my real self that was living in this way? There had been tears, frenzies, adventure, poetry, love-a life filled with emotions: I didn’t want to let them the. That evening, I was to go with my sister to L’Œuvre·, I met her at the Café du Dôme and took her off to the Jockey. As the believer at the end of a period of spiritual drought plunges into the smell of incense and candles, I lost myself in the fumes of alcohol and tobacco. They very soon went to our heads. Reverting to our old ways, we exchanged loud-mouthed insults and knocked each other about a bit. I wanted my heart to be rent beyond recall, and I took my sister to the Stryx. There we found Bresson and one of his friends, a middle-aged man who flirted with Poupette and bought her bunches of violets while I talked to Riquet; he warmly defended Jacques: ‘He’s had some hard knocks,’ he told me, ‘but he’s always risen above them.’ He assured me that there was great strength behind his apparent weaknesses, and great sincerity beneath his mask of flippancy; that he could talk of grave and painful things while sipping a cocktail – and with what lucidity he had seen through everything! ‘Jacques will never be happy,’ he concluded admiringly. My heart sank: ‘And what if some woman were to give him her all?’ I asked. ‘It would just humiliate him.’ Fear and hope clutched at my throat again. All the way along the boulevard Raspail I sobbed into my bunch of violets.

  I loved tears, hope, fear. The next morning, when Clairaut, fixing me with his steady gaze, told me: ‘You’ll do a thesis on Spinoza; there’s no greater thing in life than to marry and write a thesis,’ I took offence. Marriage and a career were two ways of throwing in the sponge. Pradelle agreed with me that work can also be a drug. I was deeply grateful to Jacques whose memory had delivered me from my brutish enslavement to my books. Doubtless many of my friends at the Sorbonne were of greater intellectual worth than he, but that didn’t matter too much. Clairaut’s, Pradelle’s futures seemed to me to be already mapped out; Jacques’ very existence, and that of his friends, appeared to me like a series of throws in a game of dice; perhaps in the end they would destroy or ruin themselves. I preferred such risks to sinking deeper and deeper into a rut.

  Once or twice a week during the next month I Went to the Stryx with Stépha, Fernando, and a Ukrainian journalist who was a friend of theirs and who preferred to spend his free time learning Japanese; I also took my sister, Lisa, and Mallet. I don’t quite know where I found the money that year, because I was no longer giving any lessons. Probably I saved something out of the five francs a day which my mother gave me for my lunches, and I managed to scrape up a bit here and there. In any case, my budget was based on the assumption that I would indulge in these orgies. I wrote in my diary: ‘Glanced through Alain’s Eleven Chapters on Plato at Picard’s. It costs eight cocktails: too dear.’ Stépha would dress up as a barmaid and help Michel to serve the clients, with whom she could joke in four languages, and sing Ukrainian folksongs. With Riquet and his middle-aged friend we talked about Giraudoux, Gide, the cinema, life, women, men, friendship, love. We would then saunter down towards Saint-Sulpice in a noisy gang. The next morning I would make a note: ‘Wonderful evening! ‘But I would intersperse my account with parentheses which struck quite a different note. Riquet had said about Jacques: ‘He’ll marry one day, out of sheer impetuosity, and perhaps he’ll make a good father: but he’ll always regret it.’ These prophecies did not unduly worry me; what disturbed me was that Jacques should have led practically the same sort of life as Riquet during the past three years. The latter spoke about women with a freedom which offended me: could I still go on believing that Jacques was a brother of Le Grand Meaulnes? I very much doubted it. After all, I had created this image of him in my mind quite without his authorization, and now I was beginning to think that perhaps he did not in the least resemble it. But I would not give in. ‘All that is very hurtful to me. I have visio
ns of Jacques that hurt me.’ All in all, if work was a narcotic, alcohol and gambling were no better. My place was neither in bars nor libraries: then where was it? I could see no other salvation than in books; I planned a new novel; its protagonists would be a heroine who would be myself and a hero who would resemble Jacques, with ‘his overweening pride and his mad urge to self-destruction.’ But I couldn’t get rid of my uneasiness. One evening, I saw Riquet, Riaucourt, and his friend Olga in a comer of the Stryx; I thought Olga looked very elegant. They were talking about a letter they had just received from Jacques; they were sending him a post-card. I couldn’t help asking myself: ‘Why does he write to them, never to me?’ I walked all one afternoon along the boulevards with my heart sunk in despair, then wound up weeping in a cinema.

  The next day, Pradelle, who was on excellent terms with my parents, came to dine at our house and then we left for the Ciné Latin. We got right to the rue Soufflot; then I suddenly suggested that he should come with me to the Jockey; he agreed, without enthusiasm. We sat down at a table like two good and sober customers, and while I drank my gin fizz I tried to explain to him who Jacques was, for I had only mentioned him to Pradelle in passing. He listened to me in a detached way. He was obviously embarrassed. I wondered if he was shocked that I frequented this sort of place. I asked him. No, but personally he found them depressing. That’s because he hasn’t known that utter loneliness and despair which justifies all derangements. Yet as I sat beside him, at a distance from the bar where I had so often behaved with such eccentric abandon, I could look upon the place with a fresh vision: he had seen through it at once, and extinguished all its poetry. Perhaps I only brought him here in order to hear him say aloud what I kept whispering quietly to myself: ‘What are you doing here?’ In any case, I at once told myself he was right, and even began to look upon Jacques with a more critical eye: why did he waste his time killing his finer feelings? I gave up my life of debauchery. My parents went to spend a few days in Arras and I did not take advantage of their absence. I refused to go to Montparnasse with Stépha; I even rejected her offers with some acerbity. I stayed at home and read Meredith.

  I gave up wondering about Jacques’ past; after all, if he had made mistakes, the heavens weren’t going to fall. Now I hardly bothered to think about him; he had kept silent too long; and the silence in the end was beginning to resemble hostility. When at the end of December his grandmother Flandin gave me the latest news about him, I couldn’t have cared less. Yet as I disliked giving anything up I supposed that on his return our love for each other would revive again.

  *

  I went on working furiously; every day I spent from nine to ten hours at my books. In January I did my teaching practice at the Lycée Janson de Sailly under the supervision of Rodrigues, a very sweet old gentleman: he was president of the League of Civil Liberties and killed himself in 1940 when the Germans entered France. My fellow-pupils were Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss; I knew them both a little. The former I had always admired from a distance. The latter’s impassivity rather intimidated me, but he used to turn it to good advantage. I thought it very funny when, in his detached voice, and with a dead-pan face, he expounded to our audience the folly of the passions. There were foggy mornings when I felt it was ridiculous to discourse upon the life of the emotions to forty boys who obviously couldn’t care less about it; but when the weather was fine, I used to take an interest in what I was saying, and I used to think that in certain eyes I could catch glimmers of intelligence. I recalled my former emotions when I used to pass by the Collège Stanislas: all this had seemed so far away, so inaccessible – being in a classroom full of boys! And now here I was out in front of the class, and it was I who was giving the lessons. I felt that there was nothing in the world I couldn’t attain now.

  I certainly didn’t regret being a woman; on the contrary it afforded me great satisfaction. My upbringing had convinced me of my sex’s intellectual inferiority, a fact admitted by many women. ‘A lady cannot hope to pass the selective examination before the fifth or sixth attempt,’ Mademoiselle Roulin had told me; she had already had two. This handicap gave my successes a prestige far in excess of that accorded to successful male students: I felt it was something exceptional even to do as well as they did: in fact, I hadn’t met a single man student who seemed at all out of the ordinary; the future was as wide open to me as it was to them: they had no advantage over me. Nor did they lay claim to any; they treated me without condescension, and even with a special kindness, for they didn’t look upon me as a rival; girls were judged in the contest by the same standards as the boys, but they were accepted as supernumeraries, and there was no struggle for the first places between the sexes. That is why a lecture I gave on Plato brought me unreserved compliments from my fellow-students – in particular from Jean Hippolyte. I was proud of having won their esteem. Their friendliness prevented me from ever taking up that ‘challenging’ attitude which later was to cause me so much dismay when I encountered it in American women: from the start, men were my comrades, not my enemies. Far from envying them, I felt that my own position, from the very fact that it was an unusual one, was one of privilege. One evening Pradelle invited to his house his best friends and their sisters. Poupette went with me. All the girls retired to Mademoiselle Pradelle’s room; but I stayed with the young men.

  Yet I did not renounce my femininity. That evening my sister and I had paid the utmost attention to our appearance. I was in red, she in blue silk; actually we were very badly got-up, but then the other girls weren’t all that grand either. In Montparnasse I had caught glimpses of elegant beauties; but their lives were too different from mine for the comparison to overwhelm me; besides, once I was free, with money in my pocket, there would be nothing to stop me imitating them. I didn’t forget that Jacques had said I was pretty; Stépha and Fernando had high hopes of me. I liked to look at myself, just as I was, in mirrors; I liked what I saw. In the things we had in common, I fancied that I was no less ill-equipped than other women and I felt no resentment towards them; so I had no desire to run them down. In many respects I set Zaza, my sister, Stépha, and even Lisa above my masculine friends, for they seemed to me more sensitive, more generous, more endowed with imagination, tears, and love. I flattered myself that I combined ‘a woman’s heart and a man’s brain’. Again I considered myself to be unique – the One and Only.

  The person who took first place in my affections was my sister. She was now taking a commercial art course at an establishment in the rue Cassette where she was very happy. At a concert organized by the school, she dressed up as a shepherdess and sang some old French songs; I thought she was ravishing. Sometimes she would go out for the evening to some party, and when she came home – blonde, pink-cheeked, animated, in her blue tulle dress – our room seemed to light up. We went together to the art exhibitions, to the Salon d’Automne and the Louvre; in the evenings she attended drawing-classes in a studio in Montmartre; I would often go to collect her there and we would walk back home across Paris, carrying on the conversation which had begun when we had first learned to talk; we would continue it in bed before falling asleep, and again the next day as soon as we found ourselves alone together. She played her part in all my friendships, my admirations, and enthusiasms. With Jacques as a hallowed exception, there was no one I was more attached to than to her; she was too close to me to be able to help me in living, but I used to think that without her my life would have lost all its savour. Whenever my feelings took a tragic turn, I would tell myself that if Jacques died I would kill myself, but that if she were to vanish from the face of the earth, I shouldn’t need to kill myself in order to die.

  I used to spend quite a lot of time with Lisa, as she had no friends and was always free. One rainy December morning she asked me, as we were leaving one of Laporte’s lectures, to go back to the hostel with her. I wanted to go home and work, and so I refused. In the place Médicis, just as I was about to get on the bus, she said in a funny voice: ‘All
right then. I’ll tell you all about it on Thursday.’ I pricked up my ears: ‘Tell me now.’ She took me to the Luxembourg Gardens; there was no one in the dripping avenues. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone; it’s too stupid.’ She hesitated: ‘Well, here it is: I should like to marry Pradelle.’ I sat down on the wire at the edge of the lawn and stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘I like him so much!’ she declared. ‘And I’ve never liked anyone before!’ They were both preparing for the same examination in science, and were attending some of the same philosophy lectures; I hadn’t noticed anything special between them when we all went out together; but I knew that Pradelle, with his thick dark lashes and his welcoming smile, made girls fall head over heels in love with him; I had learnt from Clairaut that at least two of his friends’ sisters were eating their hearts out for him. For a whole hour in the deserted gardens, under the trees dripping with wet, Lisa talked to me about this new radiance that life had taken on for her. How fragile she looked, in her threadbare coat! I thought her face was attractive under the little hat that looked like an inverted flower, but I doubted whether her rather bony grace would appeal to Pradelle. That evening, Stépha reminded me of how he had appeared bored and had changed the conversation one day when we were talking about Lisa’s loneliness and sadness. I tried to sound him. He had just come from a wedding, and we had a bit of an argument: he thought these ceremonies had a certain charm, whereas I thought this public exhibition of a private affair was sickening. I asked him if he ever thought about getting married himself. Vaguely, he replied; but he had very little hope of really loving any woman; he was too exclusively attached to his mother; he even reproached himself for a certain aridity in his feelings towards his friends. I spoke to him about that great upsurge of tenderness which sometimes made my eyes fill with tears. He shook his head: ‘All that’s a bit exaggerated.’ He himself never exaggerated anything and I was struck by the thought that he would be a difficult person to love. In any case, Lisa obviously meant nothing to him. She told me sadly that at the Sorbonne he did not show the slightest interest in her. We spent the whole of one afternoon at the bar of the Rotonde talking about love and about our loves; from the dance-floor came the strains of a jazz-band and there were voices whispering in the semi-darkness. ‘Unhappiness is a habit of mine,’ she said. ‘You’re just born like that.’ She had never had anything she wanted. ‘And yet, if only I could hold that head between my hands, it would all have been worth it, for always.’ She thought of looking for a job in the colonies, of leaving for Saigon or Antananarivo.